Civil War fort unearthed by William and Mary dig

Wren Yard Dig

Joe Fudge / Daily Press

Archaeologists from College of William and Mary are searching for Civil War era artifacts in the college's historic Wren Yard, which was the location of a Union fortification during the North's occupation of the town.

Archaeologists from College of William and Mary are searching for Civil War era artifacts in the college's historic Wren Yard, which was the location of a Union fortification during the North's occupation of the town. (Joe Fudge / Daily Press)

When College of William and Mary president Benjamin Ewell returned home at the Civil War’s end, he found the Wren Yard violently transformed.

Burned by Union troops in September 1862, the charred brick ruins of the Sir Christopher Wren Building had been remade into the tip of a formidable defensive bastion, with two long earthworks linking it to the masonry walls of the president’s house and the Brafferton Building.

Log palisades 10 feet tall stretched from these anchors across Jamestown and Richmond roads, signaling to passing Confederate scouts and their capital in not-so-distant Richmond the westernmost outpost of Federal power on the Peninsula.

But over the past few weeks archaeologists have unearthed dramatic evidence of the day when 1,500 Union troops, scores of horses and mules, dozens of wagons and lethal field guns held the tiny town and its residents in the grips of occupation.

“Despite decades of testing and sampling, there are all sorts of previously unknown, well-preserved archaeological features to be found here,” says Joe B. Jones, head of the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research.

“And we’re digging material that represents — almost 150 years ago to the day — what happened in the Wren Yard when the Union started to transform what was an abandoned piece of real estate into a fortified military encampment.”

Archaeologists uncovered their first signs of the Union occupation this past fall as part of the preparations for the $4.5 million restoration of the 1723 Brafferton Building.

Probing the ground to the southwest of the structure in advance of planned utility improvements, they put in a series of small test holes that almost immediately struck paydirt.

“One of the first things we discovered was a previously unknown and well-preserved well,” Jones says.

“We think it was dug by Union troops because it was built quickly using dry-laid recycled brick and dressed field stone — and we know they were taking down a lot of the service buildings that stood here and reusing the fragments.”

The unusually large well boasts the capacity needed to support large numbers of men as well as their horses, perhaps linking it to the 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry troopers who burned the Wren Building during the occupation that took place after the March 5, 1862 Battle of Williamsburg.

But when the archaeologists returned to the site this summer, they uncovered signs that it was soon abandoned.

Cutting across its edge was a shallow ditch filled with the stains of palisade logs, Jones says. And through the center of those stains ran a line of rusty nails that left them baffled.

“We puzzled and puzzled over those nails until we saw this,” Jones says, holding up a copy of West Point Professor Dennis Hart Mahan’s 1836 treatise on field fortifications.

“Instead of sinking the logs into the ground one by one, they laid them on the ground, nailed boards across the bottom and along the top and then raised them all up as one big unit. And the 10-foot height they call for here is exactly what Ewell describes in his report after the war ended.”

By the war’s end, the Wren Building had been converted into a storehouse and the Brafferton into the headquarters of the town’s military governor.

Tents covered the grounds in a show of Union strength designed to quell local unrest and discourage Confederate assaults.

Before the fortification was completed in March 1865, however, rebel cavalrymen made numerous raids on the town, staging running firefights up and down Duke of Gloucester Street and deadly clashes in the Wren Yard.

And after an attack by Mosby’s Raiders in February 1865, the Union was determined to stop them.

“What they did here is a textbook example of how to occupy and hold a village,” Jones says, comparing the North’s W-shaped bastion to an identical diagram in Mahan’s treatise.

“This was the front line between the two armies — and that turned the Wren Yard into a fort.”

When English colonists began exploring America in the early 17th century, curiosity played as large a role in their drive to collect, inspect and classify its many new plants, animals and insects as the lure of adventure and the profit motive.